STEVENS POINT - A Green Bay Packers game wasn't always the biggest sports event in Wisconsin. The team wasn't all that popular during the post-Curly Lambeau and pre-Vince Lombardi days.

But you would have a hard time discouraging the estimated 5,000 spectators who surrounded Goerke Field in Stevens Point to watch a Packers intra-squad game in the 1950s.

Max McGee, Tobin Rote, Dave "Hog" Hanner and Jim Ringo were probably the most recognizable Packers on the 1954 roster that practiced in Stevens Point. Bart Starr, Forrest Gregg and Bob Skoronski would come aboard in 1956. Paul Hornung and Ron Kramer were added to fold a year later.

Oh, the stories lingering out there just waiting to be told. McGee and Hornung loose in a college town. Imagine the possibilities. That is for another day and another column perhaps.

The Green Bay Packers held training camp in multiple locations in Stevens Point, although primarily at Bukolt Park, from 1954 to 1957. The team resided in Delzell Hall on campus at Central State College, now known as the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Players ate at Nelson Hall.

For brother and sister Sam and Elmae (Passineau) Omernik, the visit by the Packers holds special memories. Not because the Omerniks were huge Packers fans growing up — that would happen later in their lives — but because of personal interactions with the players.

"I remember them lingering around the store drinking soda on their way back to the (college) dorms," said Sam Omernik, who was 3 years old when the Packers invaded Stevens Point for training camp in 1954. "They would spend some time in my parents' yard."

Their parents, Ernest and Agnes, owned Omernik Grocery Store, a small, family business on Sims Avenue in Stevens Point. Seemingly like clockwork every day after practice around 4 p.m., Packers players would search out the store.

Elmae, who was 12 years old during that first training camp, would be behind the counter and one player after another would walk up and ask for a bottle of soda to quench his thirst.

Not surprisingly, Elmae and Sam were awed by their size and by one other physical characteristic. This is the first time many of the people in the neighborhood were introduced to African-Americans.

"(The players) were mainly a novelty for us because we didn't realize who they were, what they would become and how famous they would become," said Elmae, who penned a column titled, "Packer practices in Point offered city its first glimpse at pro football" that ran in the Wausau Daily Herald more than two decades ago.

"They were nice guys, big, sweaty and hot and thirsty, and we knew they were coming every day," she recollected in a phone interview for this column.

Without soda machines at that time, the Omerniks would stock the meat case with Dad's Old-Fashioned root beer, ginger ale and cream soda to name a few to make sure it was chilled for the players.

The family home was attached to the store, and some players would grab their second or third bottle of soda and stretch out on the lawn out back.

Visits from Packers players became part of the daily routine at the Omernik Grocery Store those summers.

"I do think it's kind of neat because very few people knew the club practiced in Point and Goerke Park. I can still picture them walking down Sims Avenue," Elmae said. "For us, it was just part our childhood. They were not famous, not rich. They were football players. Little kids will look up to anyone older than them, so I guess they had that kind of aura about them."

With another promising Packers season upon us, Stevens Point will always own a small place in the hallowed archives of one of the signature franchises of the NFL.